Game 110: Indians 7, Twins 6

Many people can relate to using amphetamines and other stimulants. I’ve used them. I don’t understand why they’ve been regulated. I don’t see the harm in them, since just about any jackass doing anything else can do all the amphetamines they’d like to the extent that it improves their abilities.

I can’t relate to steroids at all. I’ve never even seen one. When I played HS sports a decade again I was aware of rumors that a few people used them.

Amphetamines and steroids are both performance enhancers.

Henry Aaron came into the National League in 1954 and played in the NL through 1974, the year he broke Babe Ruth’s career home run total. The league had a 407 SA his first year, a 742 OPS, and hit 0.9 HR per game. Those numbers held up pretty much until 1963, when a little ice age hit ML bats; over the next dozen years, OPS would rise over 700 only in 1970, SA would not hit 400 and HR/G would bounce between a low of 0.55, in 1968, and a high of 0.87, in 1970. If amphetamine use was a performance enhancer, then something in the statistical record should jump out, but if there’s anything there, you’ll have to point it out to me.

Let’s just put this argument to bed, shall we? Let’s take the publication of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four in 1970—which blew the lid off the rampant use of amphetamines in MLB— as a midpoint in an amphetamine era that we’ll say runs from 1965 to 1975, and compare it to a similar 11-season run in the steroid era, 1994-2004. If you take a range of 18 offensive categories and see how many top-20 single-season performances each era contributed, you get 4 for the ‘amphetamine era’, and 83 for the ‘steroid era’.

Does this prove anything about steroids? Absolutely not. But it does confirm that amphetamines are not performance enhancers, because quite simply performance was not enhanced.

But there were many other factors that contributed to all those home runs besides just possible use of steroids.

I didn’t really want to get into this argument, because for whatever reason, the steroid issue makes people get loony. Cheating in baseball has always been part of its charm, actually: Graig Nettles’ bat exploding and a half-dozen super balls strafing the infield; Jason Grimsley crawling through the ductwork to retrieve Albert Belle’s confiscated bat—these things are funny. Baseball used to be funny, and fun. It was fun to see if someone could break Ruth’s 60, and then Maris’ 61. In July of 1969, my little league pals and I went to see Reggie Jackson, with 34 homers already, play the White Sox at County Stadium in Milwaukee (part of a Bud Selig campaign to lure the Chisox there permanently). Reggie went 0 for 4. When McGwire and Sosa came along, we all fell for it. Even my coworkers on a magazine that featured upper east side Manhattan debutantes crowded into the conference room to watch on the night McGwire hit 62.

And then came Androstenedione, and then all the other steroid revelations. Fine, I can live without a lodestar stat like HR; there are plenty of other new and fun stats to play with (RATBOP, anyone?).

Yes, other things than steroids could be at work here; the FanShot you posted offers up changes to the baseball itself as the culprit, and this is worthy of more study—though the superstructure Eric Walker has built on a foundation that consists of five baseballs of indeterminate parentage and an unknown storage history looks, I submit, ludicrous.

I believe in Truth and Reconciliation, not punishments, and I am happy to believe in Brady Anderson’s righteousness. But. Many of the top offensive performances are owned either by guys who admit to taking steroids or by guys who have been implicated through court testimony in having done so. Did their steroid use create all sorts of new baseball records? I don’t know, but pardon me if I look askance at those records.

Also, players like Mike Schmidt and Hank Aaron have admitted to using amphetamines — how do we know how many extra home runs Aaron hit because he was taking greenies?

This makes me sad. Neither Scmidt nor Aaron did anything to deserve to be included in this discussion.